Homesickness and Moving Abroad, How to Build your Home Away from Home

Travel is adrenaline inducing. The first days or weeks of a trip or big move are filled with excitement. Every day feels new, and thus, your attention is fully on the unknown and the environment around you. Overtime, as you become acclimated to the idea of travelling or the place you have moved to, the thought of home begins to creep back into your mind.

Being away from home can be tough. Home offers the idea of security and familiarity. This comfort is hard to find when travelling or moving abroad. Building a similar foundation takes time, and often can feel like it will never amount to that feeling of being home and being around loved ones. This feeling can become overwhelming, causing many travellers to choose to move back home.

Wanting to speak too, and be around my loved ones is certainly a feeling that I have had over the last 3 years of being away from home. Time passes, people grow and change, and you feel like you are not there to witness it. Despite this I feel comfortable in my life abroad. I have spent the last few years building techniques and creating the feeling of home in my life away from it.

How to feel home away from home:

1: Build a community

Use every facet of your new life as friendship making opportunties. Use these friendships to build your own small community. Connect people, introduce friends to friends, and consistently invite people to outings. By building a community you can begin to feel more at home.

2: Find people who can relate to your hometown experience

Look for people of your same nationality to spend time with. If English is your second language, find other native speakers so your experience seems less foreign. Use facebook groups, hostels, and international meetups to find people from your same background.

3: Do things that interest you

By joining local activity groups you can find people that share similar interests to you. For example, I play Flag Football in Australia. At Flag I can connect with similar people that I would’ve connected with in Canada.

4: Call back home frequently

Make an effort to call back home and connect with loved ones. By making frequent phonecalls part of your routine you can stay up to date on the happenings back home and still feel connected.

5: Remember that home is always going to be there waiting for you, but the present won’t be